I know it's bad form to suggest using other software that handles the same functionality instead of suggesting a fix, but it looks like sddm doesn't have the functionality to change displays at the time of writing.
GDM seems to have a workaround
But it looks like every display manager chooses whichever display based on arbitrary criteria.
I have 2 lenovos (ideapad and yoga) and a pinebook. I'm happy with all of them, though I'm happiest with the pinebook and yoga's impressive battery lives
Did you mean
Is that related to the gpl advocates who criticize BSD/MIT/ISC license and laugh at FreeBSD for letting Apple do something (I can’t remember what)?
I'm not trying to be a grammar nazi, I just want to make sure I'm interpreting you correctly and not putting words in your mouth.
Afaik, BSD and MIT licenses qualify as Free Software licenses. I could be wrong; I am not a lawyer, nor am I Richard Stallman.
As for your first question:
Can you explain more?
@rand_alpha19@moist.catsweat.com did a good summary of the distinction, so I will expand on m$'s role:
By most Free Software advocates' accounts, the rise of the term "Open Source" was a deliberate move to make proprietary software less of a bitter pill for us radical digital anarchists: "look, our code is Open and Transparent (but you still can't reproduce or modify it, even if you buy a license)." At the same time, Open Source advocates argued that this was the "Shoe-In-The-Door" for Free Software into the corporate/capitalist landscape—it's not, because it doesn't actually advocate any of Free Software's Four Essential Freedoms (Five, if you consider Copyleft to be essential, as I do).
So basically the corporate world took the concept of Free Software, which was starting to be a threat to their businesses, sanitized it of any actual freedom, and sold it back to devs and users as some kind of magnanimous gesture that they were letting us look (but not touch) the code they wrote. Open Source.
M$ has been essential in this shift. Perusing their github, they make it clear that they're willing to toss projects onto the pile, but make sure as hell to keep the Freedom from infecting any of their larger, popular software (e.g. Office, Visual Studio, Windows). And in return, they get access to whatever code you host on their service, assuming they can interpret vague phrasing in their Privacy Policy loosely enough.
aside from leaving them behind
Why are we conforming to fit the software's needs instead of vice-versa? Fuck the devs who can't be assed to make it work for proton at the least. This isn't my job, I'm not being paid to use software that goes against my values. There's tens of thousands of games out there and I'm gonna let myself get so hung up on the few hundred that don't work that i just go back to m$?
Fuck. That. They deserve to get left behind. No piece of media is worth compronising on my values to consume.
They tried to destroy linux and free/libre software, and when that didn't work, they started cornering the market and pushing for a move from "Free" to "Open Source." They also support SaaS model, and have made it next to impossible to get a new computer without their mediocre OS. On top of that, their OS is full of spyware, and is starting to become adware too.
But that all pales in comparison to the fact that you do not own your own OS: you can run Microsoft's OS, but you can't modify it or share it.
Oh, and this falls more in the realm of personal preference, but the deliberate lack of customizability is a real pain in the ass.
4/10 OS, only slightly better at disguising its capitalist greed than Apple.
Some plastics get gummy and start to disintegrate as thet age. You might be rubbing off the aged/oxidized plastic.
NO
I like having no boots on my neck, not just changing out what demographic is wearing it
I heard people straight up think that maddy was like, crazy and wrong and trying to get her to commit suicide together, or reading the most overtly trans scenes as being her memories/hallucinations not isabel/owen’s
That's the surface level, that's what you're supposed to think on a first-pass, uncritical viewing. The truth is scary and confusing and sounds delusional and fantastical when you've been brainwashed into a very narrow worldview. (Also I took it as you were supposed to interpret those memories as Owen's, but question whether they were false memories being influenced by Maddy's charisma)
They're not missing the point, they're running headfirst into it and getting confused by the wall they refuse to acknowledge exists. They're just not looking deeper than what they're spoonfed.
But that's the point: there is no salvation for those who lose their sense of exploration and wonder and willingness to try new things outside their realm; the people who are unable or unwilling to entertain the idea of "what if the crazy nb is telling the truth?" will never grow beyond the confines of the box they inhabit.
I don’t know how anyone can watch it and not see the transness of it, but apparently some people do.
That would be me. I have a problem where anything I experience I just take for granted, and thus all the gender fuckery is just a normal part of Coming Of Age, right??? (/s)
I mean, looking back it's hard not to see the transness, but it whooshed me when watching.
spoilers
And I’m pretty sure the ending means she never went back.
According to Schoenbrun, it's more about a realistic look at the pace of change, not about guving a definitive resolution to Owen's story:
I Saw The TV Glow spoilers
To get Owen to a place of true self-love and self-acceptance would take at least another movie. I knew that I wanted it to be really honest to the fact that just because you've now finally seen yourself clearly doesn’t mean that the half a lifetime of damage that repression has instilled in you is going to go away. I don’t view it as a cautionary tale or a definitively sad ending; I just think it’s truthful to the fact that if you’ve been taught your whole life to think of yourself as an impostor or apologize for being yourself like many trans people are, that instinct doesn’t go away overnight.
In that same interview, they also said they left an alternate ending "on the cutting room floor" with a little more catharsis and optimism
I Saw the TV Glow spoilers
The script always ended with “I’m sorry.” There was a really cool laser-tag arena in the arcade, and we did this scene of Justice running through it. But the catharsis never felt right; it felt unearned. Owen is just at a point when he’s ready to start thinking about the hard thing, not make it through the hard thing.
One of the major points of the story is how hard it is to come to terms with these feelings, how little there is to go by, how easy "the beaten path" is to fall into, how fantastical and unreal and unattainable any other mode of existence seems looking in from the outside, how messy and uncertain it all is. It makes sense that the ending wouldn't wrap everything up neatly with a Happily Ever After, but that shouldn't be taken as a message that there is no hope.
Regarding the TV screens: in both this and We're All Going to the World's Fair, Schoenbrun uses mass media as the catalyst that sparks the plot and the characters unfolding, but the narratives never seem to cast aspersions on the medium itself. I love this, because it shows media as the mirror in which we see ourselves, and not some external force of evil.
It also enables this beautiful and aesthetic style of filmmaking, where references to media that makes me feel nostalgic are now given the spotlight. At times it almost feels like the movies are less about the characters and what's happening to them, and more about the media from my adolescence and this kind of oneiric reimagination of it.
These stories earnestly show the characters and how they're influenced by media, but not in the sense that it's Corrupting The Youth. They're only seeing some element of themselves that was already there and they just didn't want to look at it. Like I said: a mirror, not a malevolence.
I'll give you the most extreme solutions I can think of, and let you decide how much of each you want to enact.
First and foremost: use a secure and privacy friendly OS—Qubes on a burner pc or GrapheneOS on a burner phone—with secure and privacy-friendly networking—use DNS-over-HTTPS, or self-host as much of the infrastructure as you can, consider a VPN, keep the device on an isolated VLAN—use a secure/private web browser like LibreWolf.
General rules of online interaction apply for maintaining privacy within the servers: e.g. don't talk specifics about your location, your age, your physical appearance, your childhood, your employer, etc.
As with most modern apps, the web app is necessarily less intrusive than the installable binary. Use the web app when you can, and limit your usage to only when you can use the web app on a computer and network you own—privacy enforcing habits are more important than all the software stopgaps in the world.
If you absolutely must use a binary, consider breaking Discord's TOS and using a modified front-end: I know some people who use Aliucord for Android, and I just this moment learned about GoofCord for desktop
It's better to have Discord stealing your browsing data to sell you shit than have some random github malware rootkitting your phone.
Stalker. The movie, not necessarily the games.
Roadside picnic is a fantastic book that feels thrilling for a scifi story. There's everything you could hope for, from deep philosophical questions to fictional technology that's described in a way that fascinates but doesn't attempt to over-explain; there's political implications to the geopolitics of the time that the authors consider. And at the center, an anti-hero who just wants to get his wish fulfilled and get out of this place, who's willing to make a deal with the devil for it.
To take all that and reimagine it as a long trialogue in an eerily deserted nature reserve/post-apocalyptic wasteland that touches upon all sorts of deep philosophy—from the divine to whether we can truly know ourselves; the struggle between logic and creativity; the vast ineffability of the natural world, not so much as Man vs. Nature conflict but as a reminder of how large and apathetic the natural world is to humanity—while maintaining a strained atmosphere of invisible threats that we never see. I could draw parallels to Dante's Inferno and Sartre's No Exit.
Then for the protagonists to leave empty-handed after it all, too afraid to find out who they truly are deep down.
chef's kiss
It is one of the most aesthetically beautiful films I've ever seen, and does something I wish more filmmakers would do: focus on atmosphere rather than plot and action. It sounds boring, but it was a transformative work of art.
It's dark, it's broody, it's strangely serene. I love it so much.
I never said there was a right choice, and I do not like people putting words in my mouth only to attack a strawman.
That’s something fascists do, and I refuse to converse further with someone who supports genocide.
Nothing, it's just no more efficient than using a GUI text editor
What do you recommend I do about disk partitions?
I recommend using defaults unless you do disk-level backups, or plan on switching disks/partitions between systems (you can put your whole /home dir on a NAS, but should you?)
I’m keeping a Windows install for the few things that demand it, does Windows still occasionally destroy Linux partitions?
Yes*. Many such cases.
*there's always a reason why it was preventable (as the top comment on that post explains), but c'mon... Really?
Do I need separate partitions for data and OS?
Probably not, for reasons I explained above
Is it straightforward to add additional distros as new partitions or is that asking for trouble?
It's straight-forward-ish. It will require deviating from installer defaults, and depends on how interconnected you want the OSes to be.
This is actually a good reason to get into partitioning shenanigans, if you'll use all the distros regularly, and you want them to have shared access to certain folders (e.g. /root, /var, /home, /tmp, /etc, etc). I recommend turning everything (except windows, /boot and /boot/efi) into logical volumes with LVS to avoid space issues when you can't extend a partition sandwiched in between two others.
By default, /boot and /boot/efi should be their own partitions--/boot should be created for Linux, and Linux will use the EFI partition created by micro$oft--and I'd recommend giving /boot N times the default amount of space (N being the number of distros you plan on keeping in rotation at any given time); this shouldn't eat up too much space, Debian gave me 500 MB for /boot. The reason being /boot carries the kernel images for each and every OS, and often duplicates thereof for rescue backups.
Is disk encryption straightforward? And is that likely to upset the Windows partition?
Yes it's easy with LUKS. Full disk encryption encrypts everything, and that will likely upset windows, idk haven't tried on my dual-boot.
Is cloud storage sync straightforward? It’s my off-site backup solution on Android and Windows (using Cryptomator with Dropbox, Google Drive, etc) but I don’t think that many providers have Linux clients. Is something like rclone recommended?
Yes, if you use a DE with it integrated. Otherwise, it's up to you to choose the right software, rclone looks like a good choice to me, but I have not used it
Should I just use apt to install software? I know there’s some kind of graphical package manager (synaptic?), does that use apt under the covers or is it separate?
synaptic is no longer used iirc. It's just called "Software Manager," but yes, I believe it's just a GUI for apt. I personally prefer doing as much as I can with the command line. Not only is it the simplest, most straightforward way of achieving whatever I'm trying to do, it's usually also the quickest and best documented. YMMV
Is it recommended to install something like Flathub too?
My experience has been to avoid non-defaults as much as possible. If there's a software you can only get as a flatpak and you need that and can't make do with an alternative, then do it. Otherwise, just see what you can do with the apt repositories
Any other pearls of wisdom? ... Any warnings about what not to do?
I could spend a few hours digging up every mistake I made and telling you what not to do, but I'd rather focus on giving you the tools to clean up after yourself when you make your own. The one best piece of advice I can give is "keep at it." There will be times when you shoot yourself in the foot and your options are to give up and lose the foot or do foot surgery right then on your own (with the help of the online community ofc). Don't be afraid to ask questions everywhere or anywhere, don't let assholes dissuade you from enjoying your Linux your way or seeking help doing so, and do read the docs. But most importantly, do keep trying; it's such a rewarding feeling.
Another would be to change as little as possible from a known working configuration at a time. Go with installer defaults as much as you can, change the stuff later. Want to try out new software? Try one new thing and get it working and looking how you envision before moving on. Read the docs so you don't take any settings for granted, that way you're not left with something that's passable instead of exactly what you want.
Make backups. Get a second SSD or an external drive and backup your system. Things like /usr, /etc, /root, and /home at the very minimum. Backups are the best way to unfuck your foot when you inevitably shoot it.
Learn the coreutils. You might not use them daily, but you'll be glad you know they're there when you need them and don't have to install extraneous software that isn't well maintained because it's a redundancy of the most common pieces of linux software.
How do I keep everything tidy?
Learn the FHS. As with most documentation, it's a bit dry, but very enlightening and will automatically put you in the top 10% of linux users with your newfound special knowledge.
There are some automatic file organizers, but you can recreate them yourself to suit your exact needs at 1/10th the resource cost using bash scripts.
Sidebar: another good piece of advice, learn to script in Bash. It basically immediately qualifies you to be a *nix sysadmin, and it makes everything automatable. It's so much easier than downloading new software or compiling a git repo for each individual task you want to automate. Additionally, it helps to learn to use cron, to run the scripts automatically, and to learn a command-line text editor (no, nano does not count)--but those're mostly just for efficiency boost, the big timesaves are in learning to script first and foremost.
As with any skill, the common wisdom is to "choose a project you want to make, then learn the skill by making it." So it's not a bad idea to learn scripting by, say, writing a script that detects files of a certain format in a directory tree and moving them elsewhere. E.g. check ~/Downloads and all of its subfolders for files ending in .jpg, then move them to ~/Pictures/JPGs (and make the directory if it's not already there). This should give you a good chance to practice file operations and string manipulation/parsing. After that, learn how to have cron run it once a week or something.
Should I use a particular terminal emulator or Firefox fork?
This just falls under my "probably best to stick with defaults and branch out later" advice, but:
I use terminator, purely because it has a logger plugin (which saves all input and output, including stderr, into a file if I'm doing something that needs that much documenting). I'd say learn to use tmux at some point as well, but that's just because I like moving my hand between keyboard and mouse as little as possible.
As for firefox, vanilla has always worked for me. It's not private enough for some people, so they will recommend something like LibreWolf or even Tor. On my laptop (which is completely keyboard driven so I can avoid using a touchpad) I use qutebrowser; it's not as full-featured (i wouldn't use it for video streaming), but it avoids using a mouse.
Hey, I recognize that art! That's the Pepper & Carrot guy! iirc, that's a FOS webcomic (CC BY 4.0 license, artwork and transcripts available for each episode). We need more people like him: using FOSS to create FOS media and contributing to the community with write-ups and guides; what a mensch.
I haven't had many issues with wayland, but there are a few sticking points, and it's usually when you get into the weeds like this. Wayland is ready for mainstream release because all the software that gets the most use is taken care of already, but when it comes to niche edge-cases, it still has a long ways to go; and it will take a lot longer to "get there" all across the board, given how uncommon it is for the already relatively small amount of people doing the edge-case work to also either have time enough to walk devs through the issues or have enough coding knowledge to contribute to the software directly.
Yes, but not all humans behave the same way in groups. That's why cultures are different, it's why the fields of sociology and anthropology exist, and it's why conflating "something a lot of people do" with "human nature" is pessimist bologna.
To conflate the way of the crowd with human nature is a folly at best
We're capable, we just have to stop relying on technology, hierarchies, and buck-passing to solve our societal problems for us.
When we rely on technology (in this case I mean "any human-made cosntruct to solve a problem" and not just "machines"), we start falling into the Golden Hammer bias. Think of a societal issue that you care about, no matter how general, look it up, and see some results are just "So-and-so has invented an app to combat [issue]." Then you look into the app and realize that it doesn't do anything to attack the root of the problem, and instead treats some symptoms while fitting into the existing framework that caused the problem in the first place. Incidentally, that's how society has become so full of middlemen.
E.g. insurance: health care becomes expensive enough to break the bank for everyone below a certain threshhold -> someome proposes a system where everyone pays so the people who need it can cash in -> the people who need it pay for this system, those who don't need it don't pay -> the system needs overhead, so it starts charging more and attempting to drive down costs -> the providers artificially increase prices to compensate for the costs being driven down -> more people need insurance. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Tons of ink has been spilled on the problems with hierarchy, but the simplest argument I can give on why it's bad at solving societal issues is: when you put your fate in someone else's hands, you give them the ability to make choices that negatively impact you with no recourse.
Every solution to this problem so far has either been "let's just add another person who sits above the people who sit above us" (which just adds a layer to the original problem) or "let's try to make our relationship more equal without removing their power over us" which cuts down on the benefits of entrusting that power to someone else AND provides none of the benefits of an equal (horizontal) relationship.
Finally, buck-passing is tempting, especially when the problems aren't our fault. But we've become a global society of people looking to point the finger at someone else, and pay another person to do the hard part for us.
Take climate change for example. One of the rallying cries of online activists has been "100 companies are responsible for 71% of GHG emissions." Great! Now what? What good did assigning blame do? What I've been told is that now we should get them to stop. Ok, how? The response i usually get is to elect officials who will enact sanctions for polluting and rewards for cutting down on pollution. And now we're passing the buck, adding a middleman, giving someone else power over us to control our fate, and completely relying on the demonstrably broken technology that is representative government.
What I want to know is what I can personally do today, starting now, to combat the problem. What change to my lifestyle can I make that won't destroy me or my future? I'm not saying we shouldn't support representatives who act in our interests—we absolutely, unequivocally should do that (unless it hampers our ability to enact a better solution)—but I want a solution I can personally participate in, too.
Because, by and large, those solutions get a lot more good done quicker while relying less on "necessary" evils.
Cool now do parallel downloads and I'll quit using Nala
Don't use hacky unlocks if there's an official way. The best case scenario is it becomes a headache and isn't reliable; ghe worst case is that it bricks your phone or installs malware in the bootloader
All I could find looking for custom ROMs for your phone was XDA users shrugging their shoulders and unverified downloads from very shady websites/githubs. I'd suggest getting the most out of this phone you can before selling it and getting one you know works with the OS you want